Take a Video Tour of the New Whitney Museum with Curator Dana Miller

It’s official: the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new home is a hit. The Renzo Piano–designed building, 200,000 square feet straddling the High Line and the West Side Highway, has shifted the art world’s center of gravity. And it hasn’t even officially opened yet.

It’s not often that a project of such scale (it is expected to cost $422 million) is praised for its restraint, but the new Whitney is dedicated to art rather than to itself. (Frank Gehry’s gorgeous, billowing edifice for the Fondation Louis Vuitton would be an example of the latter.) And while the Piano design—the exterior of which can seem alternately like a yacht and a power plant, depending on the vantage point—has been the focus of discussion so far, the inaugural exhibition, “America Is Hard to See,” is just as revolutionary.

“We are shifting from the whole kunsthalle model to a more balanced approach,” says Dana Miller, curator of the Whitney’s permanent collections. “This will be the kind of place you bring your aunt when she visits New York and wants to see Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns.”

Culled from the Whitney’s own holdings, “America Is Hard to See” occupies all of the museum’s galleries, which offer about 60 percent more gallery space than the Breuer building and will allow much more of the collection to be on view at any given time. “There was no sense of putting a Carsten Höller slide [in the first exhibition], or doing something jazzy,” Miller says of the first show. “It was about doing a deep dive into the collection and deciding what deserves to be seen, and also finding out what we needed to acquire in time for the opening.”

Miller says that a 2006 show at the Whitney’s former location, appropriately titled “Full House,” served as “a bit of a testing ground” for this new exhibition. More recently, the staff brought guest speakers like Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong and former Museum of Modern Art curator John Elderfield for roundtable discussions. (Elderfield, who helped open MoMA’s current space in 2004, gave Miller some simple advice advice: “You’re not going to be ready in time. Get used to it.”) At a galvanizing meeting with Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and a former Whitney staffer, the curators realized there were gaps in the collection’s holdings, specifically of work by black artists dating before 1980. Discussions with experts in Asian-American and Latino art followed. “They helped us discover new strengths and weaknesses, and also helped us create priority lists of what to buy,” Miller says.

The final hanging includes work both recently acquired and not seen in decades, as well as Whitney stalwarts such as Jasper Johns’s Three Flags. For Miller, choosing a favorite gallery in this show would be “Sophie’s choice.”

The most unexpected hurdle for Miller and her team happened to be fundamental to the museum’s mission: working out what qualifies as “American art.” “What does that term mean?” Miller says. “Can only American artists make American art? And if it’s only American artists, then by what criteria do you consider someone American?” (Those questions are the basis for Miller’s essay in the Whitney’s new Handbook of the Collection, published in time for the opening.) With that in mind, for the first time in the museum’s 84-year history, curators have included artists’ places of birth and death on wall labels, an effort to demonstrate that many American artists were born abroad. “It’s a signal change,” Miller says.

The title of the exhibition—“America Is Hard to See”—is taken from a 1951 Robert Frost poem, first published in The Atlantic, about Columbus encountering North America while he was searching for something else. The stanza reads like a call to go see the new Whitney for yourself:

America is hard to see. Less partial witnesses than he In book on book have testified They could not see it from outside— Or inside either for that matter. We know the literary chatter.

“America Is Hard to See” will be on view May 1 to September 27, 2015 at the Whitney Museum of Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, New York City.